I picked my first tomato today, along with four cherry tomatoes, and of course, I had tomato toast for breakfast.

We are really short on rain. We got almost 3/4 of an inch over the weekend, and that helped, but I will need to continue to water. I Fertilized everything about a week ago.

I picked peas over the weekend. They were good, but way fewer than last year. Germination was poor this year, and I had lots of gaps along the trellis, likely because of the lack of rain and my not getting enough water on them early on.

We’ve picked a bunch of lettuce, and I’ve given three or four heads away. It is starting to bolt, so we are probably near the end. I might replace it with arugula.

Jared came yesterday and spent about three hours cleaning out the blackberry patch removing buckthorn, maples, grapevines, and nightshade. He pulled out an amazing amount of stuff. I cut up about 1/3 of it and got it into the garden waste bin, and stacked the rest over the firepit so that RT could mow, I am hoping this greatly increases the harvest. It should make it easier for Annabelle to pick some berries.

First cucumber today, Summer Dance from Countryside, and another round of romaine. This is the first cutting of the Red Romaine.

Yesterday, t I went to Goebbert’s and got a couple of BOGO flats of flowers that I’ll plant around the mint garden to get some color in the yard. I bought their last 8 Roma tomato plants and bought 7 bush tomatoes to fill out that space. I bought more curly parsley, 3 Gypsy peppers to replace the ones the rabbits chomped on and some Thai Basil.

I went out around 10:00 and planted parsley, 6 replacement peppers, 15 tomato plants, 2 hills of Cocozelle Zucchini seeds, and a hill of patty pan squash seeds. I stood out in the rain and watered my new plantings, lacking the faith that we would get a useful amount of rain. Three of the supposed Roma tomatoes turned out to be Early Girls, which I wasn’t happy about.

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Tonight, June 10, 2023, at 8:35 PM the Fireflies made their first appearance of the year. They are just a couple of days later than last year and a week or so earlier than the previous couple of years, which is not surprising because of the warm dry weather we have been having. To me, it always signals the beginning of summer and brings back lots of childhood memories. I’ve seen them flitting around in the late afternoon, so I figured that they would be arriving soon.

Here is a short and weird audio bit that I put together about some fireflies a couple of years ago.